From Miss Swanwick’s Translation of ‘The Eumenides.’

AESOP

(Seventh Century B.C.)

BY HARRY THURSTON PECK

Like Homer, the greatest of the world’s epic poets, Aesop (Aesopus), the most famous of the world’s fabulists, has been regarded by certain scholars as a wholly mythical personage.  The many improbable stories that are told about him gain some credence for this theory, which is set forth in detail by the Italian scholar Vico, who says:—­“Aesop, regarded philosophically, will be found not to have been an actually existing man, but rather an abstraction representing a class,”—­in other words, merely a convenient invention of the later Greeks, who ascribed to him all the fables of which they could find no certain author.

[Illustration:  Aesop]

The only narrative upon which the ancient writers are in the main agreed represents Aesop as living in the seventh century before Christ.  As with Homer, so with Aesop, several cities of Asia Minor claimed the honor of having been his birthplace.  Born a slave and hideously ugly, his keen wit led his admiring master to set him free; after which he traveled, visiting Athens, where he is said to have told his fable of King Log and King Stork to the citizens who were complaining of the rule of Pisistratus.  Still later, having won the favor of King Croesus of Lydia, he was sent by him to Delphi with a gift of money for the citizens of that place; but in the course of a dispute as to its distribution, he was slain by the Delphians, who threw him over a precipice.

The fables that bore his name seem not to have been committed by him to writing, but for a long time were handed down from generation to generation by oral tradition; so that the same fables are sometimes found quoted in slightly different forms, and we hear of men learning them in conversation rather than from books.  They were, however, universally popular.  Socrates while in prison amused himself by turning some of them into verse.  Aristophanes cites them in his plays; and he tells how certain suitors once tried to win favor of a judge by repeating to him some of the amusing stories of Aesop.  The Athenians even erected a statue in his honor.  At a later period, the fables were gathered together and published by the Athenian statesman and orator, Demetrius Phalereus, in B.C. 320, and were versified by Babrius (of uncertain date), whose collection is the only one in Greek of which any substantial portion still survives.  They were often translated by the Romans, and the Latin version by Phaedrus, the freedman of Augustus Caesar, is still preserved and still used as a school-book.  Forty-two of them are likewise found in a Latin work by one Avianus, dating from the fifth century after Christ.  During the Middle Ages, when much of the classical literature had been lost or forgotten, Aesop, who was called by the mediaevals “Isopet,” was still read in various forms; and in modern times he has served as a model for a great number of imitations, of which the most successful are those in French by Lafontaine and those in English by John Gay.